OpenRail Annual Report 2025: From Collaboration to Impact
30 March 2026
Digital resilience, interoperability, and innovation are becoming strategic priorities for the railway sector. What began as open collaboration has evolved into a strong community and a growing ecosystem. Discover how OpenRail is turning this momentum into measurable results in its second year.
Introduction: From Collaboration to Impact
The OpenRail Association has published its Annual Report for 2025, reflecting a year of growing collaboration around open source in the railway sector. The report outlines recent developments across OpenRail projects and shows how collaborative software development is increasingly supporting real operational use, with the Open Source Railway Designer (OSRD) entering production use at SNCF Réseau. It also reflects on the broader role of open source in strengthening digital resilience and interoperability in railway infrastructure.
“In a rapidly evolving geopolitical environment, digital resilience – grounded in sovereignty and security – has become a strategic necessity for critical infrastructure. Across the rail sector, open source is increasingly recognized as a cornerstone of resilient digital systems. This reinforces the strategic relevance of the OpenRail Association and its mission to advance the collaborative development of open source software for rail.” — Jochen Decker, Chair of the Board of Directors of the OpenRail Association and CIO at SBB
Looking Back: A Year of Significant Progress and Growing Collaboration
Following its founding year in 2024, the OpenRail Association expanded its activities in 2025, strengthening collaboration across the railway sector and delivering tangible results.
Key milestones include the Open Source Railway Designer (OSRD) reaching the Qualified stage and entering production use at SNCF Réseau with around 100 active users. Other projects, such as Rail Condition Monitoring OSS, now support more than 500 users, demonstrating real-world impact. At the same time, collaboration across organizations continued to grow. Shared development efforts and common software components are helping to accelerate innovation and reduce duplication across the sector. Further details on these developments are provided throughout the Annual Report.
OpenRail Projects: Collaborative Software for the Railway Sector
The OpenRail project portfolio continued to grow and mature in 2025, reflecting a shift from isolated development toward shared, reusable solutions across the railway sector.
Projects within the portfolio cover key domains including infrastructure design (OSRD), timetable planning (Netzgrafik-Editor), diagnostic data standards (RCM-DX and RCM OSS), migration planning (DAC Migration DSS), and core data libraries (libLRS). Together, they illustrate how open collaboration enables organizations to address common challenges more efficiently and at scale.
Several projects are already delivering real-world impact, with production deployments and growing user bases across Europe. This portfolio demonstrates how shared development can create practical digital building blocks that support interoperability and accelerate innovation.
Strengthening the Ecosystem
Throughout 2025, the OpenRail Association brought its community together through events and collaboration initiatives that made open source in rail tangible. Events such as Hack4Rail, where interdisciplinary teams developed solutions to real-world challenges, the Railways and Open Transport Devroom at FOSDEM, which brought the community together at scale, and OpenRail Day in Paris, where hundreds of participants connected across organizations, highlight how collaboration is taking shape in practice.
What emerges is more than shared code. It is a connected and growing community of developers, railway professionals, and researchers working together on shared digital solutions. These interactions are turning ideas into solutions and strengthening the ecosystem behind OpenRail.
Looking Ahead: Building Resilient Digital Infrastructure
As digital transformation accelerates across the railway sector, open source is becoming a key enabler of resilience, interoperability, and long-term flexibility. OpenRail is further expanding its project ecosystem, fostering cross-organizational collaboration, and supporting the adoption of open, interoperable solutions for railway systems.
By combining transparent governance, shared development, and real-world operational use, the OpenRail Association is helping to reduce dependencies and strengthen resilient digital infrastructure across the sector.
Join Us: Advancing Open Source in Rail
The OpenRail Association invites railway operators, infrastructure managers, developers, and innovators to participate in its growing ecosystem. By working together through open source collaboration, the railway sector can build interoperable, sustainable, and future-ready digital solutions.
